“I hope you got the hamper all right, and that the ‘grub’ was good and of the right sort. Your ‘war dance’ amused us excessively, and of course there is no harm in a war dance; but, if it is forbidden, what an old goose you are to risk having impositions and extra lessons for it! But schoolboys are always the same, and I can’t expect you to be wiser than the rest. “If you can’t make out why your copies are wrong, why don’t you ask one of your schoolfellows? I suppose some of them are good fellows, and would tell you your mistake; or say openly to the master that you can’t find out, and I should think he would enlighten you. At least, he _ought_. We shall have you home in about three weeks, and right glad we shall be. Go at it hard for the remainder of the term, for remember the entrance Exam. You must work a little in the holidays to keep up what you know. The boys are better, and have been playing football vigorously. Best love to Herbert; ask him whether he wants any cricket practice. I mean Hughes to bowl. God bless you. “Yours most affectionately, “G. E. H.” Westward Ho, from which several of the preceding letters were written, had become his favourite watering-place. He had gone there at first by chance, and, finding links and a golf club, had taken to the game with his usual success. At Pau he had played a little, but certainly never handled a club till he was past forty. Nevertheless, though it is a game in which, I am told, early training and constant practice is almost an essential condition of success, he entered for, and succeeded in winning the champion’s medal in the annual gathering of 1870. Soon after his return from the meeting he wrote to me. “We spent three very pleasant weeks at Westward Ho. I wish that I could infect you with ‘golfomania.’ Golf is _the_ middle-aged man’s game. I mean by the middle-aged man, the man who could _once_, but cannot _now_, get down upon a leg shooter. We had a dozen hard-worked men from the city, besides doctors, lawyers, soldiers on leave, etc., all perfectly mad whilst it lasted. I was quite as mad as the rest, and having now ‘relapsed’ into sanity, I am able to look back upon it with the most intense amusement. The humour of the whole thing was positively sublime. You have heard squires at their wine after a good run—bless you, they can’t hold a candle to golfers. Most of the players were Scotch, and the earnestness with which the Scotch ‘play’ is a caution. I think of trying my hand at a rhapsody about golf.”